joe randel's art dump

Oh my god are my feet sore! Walking around the convention floor can really wear a guy down…

Well, let’s see now, where to start. Well, I woke up this morning at about 4am because I’m still stuck in my time zone. Suck. So I got up and took some more pictures. Later, once everything opened up, I found myself at a crepe restaurant. It was there I had the pleasure of having a lemon and sugar crepe for breakfast. Man… it was super tasty!

Soon after that I made it to the hotel and on to a shuttle bus for E3. When I got there I didn’t even have to make in to the building before I got my first E3 swag. It was a bottle of water promoting a new Wii game called Firefighter. I saved it for later as I figured I’d need it.

Oh! And I also almost lost my mind when I saw they had Ecto-1 right in front of the convention center! I was 8 years old again as I stared at it… I wanted to lick it but there was too many people around.

Soon I found the line that the rest of the geeks… er… people where waiting in and stood in the back of it. A few seconds later someone else stood behind me and the line got longer… a lot longer… only people really didn’t use good logic and just twisted the line back in to the building. o_O Oh! And the guy right behind me was an uber geek in the worst way… with really bad social skills. Seriously… you know the kind of person I’m talking about. The ones that just talk loudly outward hoping that anyone will answer back, and when no one does they just answer them self. Yeah, that kind. And then some reporter comes over and INTERVIEWS the guy! Holy crap! Why do they always pick the worst ones to interview! sigh…

So yeah, when I got inside I the first booth I saw had Muramasa set up for demo play. Awww yeah! So I strolled right up and played me some of that and was in total awe of the beauty my eyes took in. Then I got a boner. I also played some KoF and a DS title called Nostalgia. After that I wandered around and checked out the other booths. Activision was a booth full of noise, and very large screens set up so show the new Tony Hawk title and DJ Hero among others. At Nintendo’s booth I got to play Sin and Punishment 2, New Super Mario Bros Wii, Wii Sports Resort, Silent Hill Wii, Golden Sun DS (actually not a demo and just a clip), Some game where I had players follow me in a line (pretty fun), and the new Prof Layton on DS. All where lots of fun. ^_^

After that I wandered around and took pictures of the other booths and games. I didn’t play much because most of the lines where kind of long and I didn’t want to stand around when there was so much to see. I did see tons of Rock Band and Guitar Hero seeing that there was a bout a jillion sets up dotted around the convention. I also saw Batman Asylum game, God of War 3, Trauma Team on Wii, and played a bit of Desgaea 2 on PSP and Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman on PSP. All where pretty good from what I saw.

I didn’t get to see much of the other hall at the convention center until the last hour. I figure I’ll spend more time there tomorrow. That’s where SquareEnix, Ubi, SEGA, Microsoft and all the others are. I did snap a few pics of there though.

But what was the most interesting part of my day? Well… I was hungry and so I went to the food court to have a bite. It was pretty full except for one guy sitting at a four seater table by himself. I asked if I could sit and he said sure. A few min later he gets up and leaves me all alone. But not for long… a very pretty booth lady (I find “booth babe” degrading) asks if she can sit at my table with me so she can eat. I said sure and we get to talking about games, where I’m from, what she does, what I do, traveling, LA and so forth. She was very nice, smart and a present to talk to. Soon her break is over and she has to get on to the floor again, but what does she do? She gives me her business card! It says she’s a yoga instructor and wellness coach. Now I don’t know if she was trying to pick me up or not but it sure was an ego boost for me I tell ya. I told me wife of course, I wouldn’t keep something like this a secret. She thinks it funny and she got a bit jealous, but nothing bad. It’s all in good fun ^_^

So yeah… first E3 ever and I get picked up by a booth lady. Rock on!

On to Day Three ->